Instead of pushing her own pet projects, Palo Alto Mayor Nancy Shepherd called on residents during her state of the city address Tuesday to help the city council plot a course for the future.

About 100 people crowded into the ballroom of the Lucie Stern Community Center to hear her nearly 20-minute speech. Past mayors have used the opportunity to outline initiatives and objectives.

Shepherd focused on the city council’s ambitious work plan for 2014, which includes addressing a parking shortage in the downtown and California Avenue business districts, reviewing a controversial type of zoning known as planned community and updating the city’s housing element.

“These actions are not easy,” the mother of four said. “And we may have a tendency to revert back to our ‘Palo Alto process’ delay tactic, so we need your help to keep us moving forward. This is where your ideas and participation will help inform the council’s decisions.”

Shepherd acknowledged concerns that the city is changing for the worse as a result of its success. Commercial vacancies, for example, are at all-time lows, and values have soared from $900 to $1,100 per square foot. As a result, some small businesses are being shown the door.

But Palo Alto has wrestled with change since its inception, Shepherd said. She pointed to its transition from a grain and lumber town in the 1870s to one occupied by orchards. The opening of Stanford University in 1891 ultimately transformed the city into the high-tech powerhouse it is today.

“Like those before us,” she said, “we must strike the right balance between evolving as a city while maintaining those things that make our Palo Alto livable.”

To drive home her point about change, Shepherd played a short video clip from 1969 of Fredrick Terman, the so-called “father of Silicon Valley,” addressing complaints from residents about the city’s industrialization.

“If they came here 20 years ago, they love the Palo Alto of that time. They complain about the changes — the increased traffic and more land being built on and so on. If they came here five or eight or 10 years ago, they like it that way and they’re perfectly content,” said Terman, who mentored Bill Hewlett and David Packard at Stanford University.

“The fact that each new group of, you might say, immigrants that come here and settle down in Palo Alto like the town the way it was when they arrived, even if they only arrived fairly recently, means it can’t all be bad.”

Shepherd invited residents to help the city chart a course for its future through its new “Our Palo Alto” initiative. She also vowed to hold related conversations far from the confines of City Hall. For instance, a picnic in a park could serve as a venue to discuss the parks and recreation master plan.

“Yes, there are challenges ahead,” Shepherd concluded. “And those will continue. But many of the issues we will tackle together as a community are borne of this incredible Palo Alto ‘adventure,’ this transformation into a global city with neighborhoods that are still connected. This is our Palo Alto.”

Jason Green is a breaking news reporter for the Bay Area News Group. He works week nights and spends most of his time covering crime and public safety. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California, he cut his teeth at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and the Palo Alto Daily News, and has been with the Bay Area News Group since its inception.

More in News

An Anaheim tagging crew member accused of stabbing a 12-year-old rival to death testified on Monday that he acted in self-defense and denied claims by a prosecutor that he yelled “Die! Die! Die!” as he delivered the fatal blows.